The AA Summer School arrived in Latin America in 2025 with an intensive three-week programme based in Mexico City. The course welcomes creatives from Latin America and beyond who are eager to engage with, and contribute to, the city’s vibrant cultural sphere. Rooted in the AA’s tradition of experimental and provocative architectural education, the programme promotes learning through direct engagement, on-site exploration and active collaboration with local cultural institutions.

Mexico City serves as both context and classroom. Students learn from the city through guided urban explorations, collective research and a public programme of lectures and conversations with the city’s architects and artists. These encounters foster an intergenerational and cross-disciplinary dialogue that seeks to inform and expand students’ creative practice.

This year, AASS Latin America returns with an extended and enhanced programme that immerses participants in the contradictions and absurdities of Mexico City. Known for its intensity and apparent chaos, the city oscillates between the magical and the overwhelming. Embracing this duality, the programme seeks to uncover the hidden rhythms and meanings embedded in everyday urban life, understanding the ingenuity of the streets as profoundly creative events from which architects can learn. Through observation, interpretation and action, students are encouraged to reveal the extraordinary within the mundane.

The programme concludes with a collective installation designed and built by students: a public, spatial event that assembles three weeks of investigation, experimentation and collaboration into a shared architectural outcome.